Hi well I can say Not like This
http://youtu.be/GdtpsG--V3I
He didn't give the crocodiles much of a chance.
Il Padrone: I don't think sealing the breather holes will be enough, on the Rohloff at least. Maybe on the SON, but I won't be paying for carriage to Germany, labour, parts, carriage back to Oz, when you need new bearings.
On the Rohloff the breather hole is the very least of your worries. What you have to consider is that the so-called "seals" to the sides are seals only by engineering courtesy. Proper seals, as we think of them from automobile practice, scaled and designed to keep out water, would make Rohloff atrociously heavy, quite unusable in a bicycle. Instead, that pre-eminent weight weenie (truly, he doesn't get enough credit for it) Bernd Rohloff designed his superior hub gearbox with seals, some of them paper, only good enough to keep dust out of the gearbox. Water would just flow in.
Whether the water would do as much damage as Dan fears is another matter. See, Herr Rohloff also designed his gearbox to survive abuse by the non-maintenance of circumstances in the back of beyond (or by careless idiots, of which there seem remarkably few in the Rohloff world), so all the necessary lubrication sticks to the gears and shafts themselves. I suspect -- on zero evidence*, and I'm not offering my beloved box as a guinea pig -- that your gearbox will come to no harm if you were to leave off changing the oil until you camp that night. But I don't know that I would leave it overnight. It is a fallacy that oil is insoluble in water; it depends on various oxidization processes. (See for instance the painting at
http://www.sketching.cc/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2163&start=30#p18689 which I made with water-miscible oil paints and water-soluble oil painting medium.)
*** Not quite zero evidence. On two occasions in the harvest season on narrow lanes hereabouts I've ridden into the ditch to escape thundering industrial tractors fully the width of the lane. On each occasion I changed the oil within the hour, and on neither occasion was there any evidence of water inside the box. You'd see it because you'd get more out than the 10ml or so that you usually get out, and there would floating water; I saw neither. But these were immersions of seconds while a tractor and trailer or a huge bailer passed, not several minutes to cover a good bit of water further agitated by the turning wheel. Also, I don't keep my bike or the Rohloff box in the sparkling condition demonstrated by the photos of many posters here. There's a bit of buildup of oil and crud as the hub breathes out a little excess oil, which I wipe off once a year at the annual oil change; it's not much grease but even a thin film would resist water until it is beaded enough for water to flow. So that by itself could be enough to delay water flowing into the hub for a few seconds.
